Configuring Github Pages With a Custom Domain

Sat, 14 Jan 2023 16:45:33 -0800

To setup my custom domain I went through the following steps:

Verify Domain: I followed these steps to verify. Note that this was done using my GitHub accounts settings and not the repositories settings.
Configuring my subdomain: Next I configured my subdomain to be used as my custom domain with GitHub pages by following these steps which involved adding a CNAME record to my DNS settings with my domain registrar. Note that as I was using a subdomain adding a CNAME record was all that was needed (however if I was to use an apex domain, I would have needed to add A and AAAA records too pointing to GitHub’s ip addresses).
Add CNAME file: You need to add a file called CNAME to the root of your generated static site that contains your host name only (i.e. for this site til.softinio). As I use Hugo, I put this in the static directory as when the site is created it will be put in the root. Here is an example.
Configuring GitHub Pages: Go to your repositories settings and select pages. Enter your domain name, save it and click check. Tick the box to enforce https.

Notes

This TIL does not cover setting up GitHub actions to build and deploy your code. Here is a sample.
You need to have your site deployed at least once so that the gh-pages branch is created so that you can set the site source branch in your repositories pages settings.
To make sure your GitHub actions is able to create the gh-pages branch, go to your repositories settings, then click Actions then General and under the workflow permissions section make sure the read and write permissions is selected and saved.